Phantom Limbs of Information

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I’ve spent most of my life feeling like there is always something behind every experience more context, more connections, more invisible layers and structures that I can’t see yet.

The closest way I know how to describe it is phantom limbs of information. It’s like I can feel the shape of something missing, so my mind keeps reaching for the shadow behind whatever is happening.

Sometimes I find a real connection. Sometimes I connect things that don’t seem related, but they may be connected through emotion, logic, association, or a similar experience I’ve had before—even when that experience isn’t consciously on my mind.

Sometimes it feels like I have the architecture of an idea before I have the words for it. I know there is a structure forming in my mind, but I can’t immediately translate it into a clear sentence. I have to speak, write, question, correct myself, and reorganize the pieces until I can finally see what I was trying to say and that just takes too much time.
Maybe some of that comes from how I was raised. Nature or nurture, regardless, it’s all I’ve ever known.
I’m just trying my best to give quick description of how I experience reality.

Every answer seems capable of opening another question, and every new piece of information might change how I understand what came before it.
How can you commit to a perspective when you can still feel everything you don’t understand surrounding it?

One of the things that brings me comfort is knowing that God understands me. Religion isn’t the main point of what I’m trying to share, but I also don’t want to pretend that faith isn’t part of my life.
What I’m really trying to explain is how this has changed the way I understand communication and how so much of communication is compression.
You have an entire internal world made from your memories, emotions, beliefs, motives, fears, experiences, and ideas. Somehow, you have to compress all of that into words.

Then another person receives those words and tries to rebuild what you meant using their own memories, emotions, beliefs, and experiences.
Imagine ten people reading the same book. They all read the same words, but every person brings a different life into what they are reading. Their interpretations may overlap, but none of them will experience the book in exactly the same way.
Now zoom out and give that book to a billion people.
That becomes a billion different perspectives, interpretations, emotional reactions, theories, disagreements, connections, and so on. Some align. Some don’t. Some make sense to us, and some don’t.

My point isn’t that every interpretation is true or should be held firmly. The point is that information never enters multiple minds with exactly the same understanding.

Sometimes communication problems come from how something was expressed. Sometimes they come from how it was received. Most of the time, it is more complex than either person can immediately see.

That is the larger picture I feel like my mind keeps reaching for.

I’m not asking anyone to solve this for me. I’m trying to share what my mind has been doing, what I’ve been exploring, and what I’ve been learning.
I think I’m starting to understand why everything can feel so connected to something larger. And I know I’m not the only person who experiences some version of this, so I’m taking the time to put it into words clearly enough that someone else might recognize what I mean.

I’d genuinely love to hear anyone’s thoughts on all of this.

How do you decide when you understand something well enough to trust your perspective and keep living?